I attended the recent concluded cloudforce conference in Bangalore and where the discussion was around email on it's way out in the consumer space and how the same trend will follow inside corporate walls. This is a theme which I have been continuously discussing in the last two years and have seen many organizations using social tools to reduce their email dependency considerably. Here is a video of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at Nielsen Consumer 360 where she talks on the same theme. Email on its way out !
Dumb Feature on Foursquare: Just realized that even if you click do not share on facebook button while checking into a location, Foursquare put a post indicating that I became the Mayor of that location. How dumb! The whole idea of not sharing with Facebook friends was precisely not to tell them that I was checking into this locations. Other way to look at this is that the privacy setting got overridden by the score keeping module.
06/08/2011
My takeaways from the latest Apple WWDC Keynotes
- Take the pain away from people to upload/download/sync anything, photos, music, documents, etc.
- When you copy a feature from another competing platform take a couple of notches above. e.g notifications
- Bring the competition to your home turf where they will not be able to compete. e.g. making icloud free and use it for all device sync.
- Increase business for partners. Developers: 2.5 Bn paid out and Telcos: Will see a huge increase in their bandwidth usage due to icloud.
- Cross pollinate ideas from platforms. Features form OSX moved to IOS and vice versa. E.g. Face recognition and image editing in iphone, Launchpad and App store on Mac
- Give into some of the extremely popular demands of users. E.g use volume up to click pictures.
We have heard of the “carrot and stick” mode of management and we believe in it. Whether it is a school, government or business everyone employs carrot and stick model in some way or another. What if this hypothesis was wrong? What if it’s applicability had weakened in the current times? Dan Pink analyzes this question and argues his case that businesses should go beyond “carrot and stick” for motivating employees in this TED talk. I agree with Dan and have personally seen how many of the policies in large organizations failed to make any impact due to this mindset.
Firstly what motivates people to come to office is the quality of work. Give them substandard work and you will not get them motivated with any amount of incentives.
What we really need in to empower employees to take decisions and not treat them with kid gloves.
Lastly and most importantly keep the communication channels open and transparent. People are far more technologically networked than almost a decade ago and there is no way companies can afford to create silos.
